We're All Stuck Out In the Desert (Johnathan Rice)
Kid Things (Counting Crows)
Like a Rolling Stone (Bob Dylan)
Stand In the Same Room
Ring of Fire (Johnny Cash)
Airport In Amsterdam
Seven Spanish Angels (Ray Charles)
A Taste for Blood
Oh My Sweet Carolina (Ryan Adams)
Brown-Eyed Girl (Van Morrison)
Lucky Now (Ryan Adams)
The Cave (Mumford and Sons)
Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen)
You Ain't Going Nowhere (Bob Dylan)
Texas and Tennessee
Cumbersome (Seven Mary Three)
Tuesday's Gone (Lynyrd Skynyrd)
Chicken
Dead Flowers (The Rolling Stones)
Rocketman (Elton John)
Knockin' On Heaven's Door (Bob Dylan)
Only You (Yaz)
Poison
Fit
Let It Be (The Beatles)
Wales
Gray City
30
You Can't Always Get What You Want (The Rolling Stones)
Stand By Me (Ben E. King)
Suffer
The Neighborhood Is Bleeding (Manchester Orchestra)
Summer Never Came
Someday (The Strokes)
Say My Name
Calling You (Blue October)
Here He Comes (The Wallflowers)
Here's the setlist from tonight's show at the Purple Pig Cafe!
Landslide (Fleetwood Mac)
Don't Think Twice, It's Alright (Bob Dylan)
Rocketman (Elton John)
A Long December (Counting Crows)
Texas and Tennessee
One (U2)
Cumbersome (Seven Mary Three)
Heartbreak World (Matt Nathanson)
Don't Go Away (Oasis)
Chicken
Jimmy Olsen's Blues (Spin Doctors)
You Ain't Going Nowhere (Bob Dylan)
Seven Spanish Angels (Ray Charles)
Restless Dream (Jack's Mannequin)
Stand In the Same Room
Lifeline
Calling You (Blue October)
Kid Things (Counting Crows)
Suffer
Cannonball (Damien Rice)
Stand By Me (Ben E. King)
Airport In Amsterdam
Say My Name
New Orleans Dry
Life On a Chain (Pete Yorn)
Only You (Yaz)
Poison
Someday (The Strokes)
Wales
For years and years I avoided facebook like the plague, but eventually I had to join because of my day job. In the two years that I've been using it I've realized that we wouldn't have had the chance to reach nearly as many people if it weren't for sites like facebook and ReverbNation. Though I resisted at first, I'm not a firm believer in the positive power of social networking. Our great friend Mark Montgomery runs a social media business and has helped us out a lot in growing our presence online, and he has a lot of cool thoughts to share on this technology at Your Social Media Guy. Check out his blog!
As someone who used to be oblivious to social media altogether, I think it's really funny that I've written two different songs as a result of things that I saw on facebook. Today's blog is actually about one of them - one of our newer songs called "Suffer". Yeah, I know I write a lot of downer music. And the title of this one makes it sound like just another depressing track from yours truly. But, despite the name, it's actually one of my more positive, uplifting songs...inspired by all the downer things I see every day online.
You know, I see so many positive possibilities with the online world. There are so many opportunities to share art and information with people with whom you would never come into contact otherwise. And there are a lot of worthwhile subjects out there to be talking about. I do think that we probably overshare online. Sorry, but if all you had for breakfast was toast, I do not care. Not one little bit. That's a minor annoyance for me, having to see who all had toast for breakfast every day. But what really gets me is when I log on to facebook or any other site and see nothing but complaints, day in and day out.
I'm a very private person about everyday things. I don't share any kind of personal news whatsoever online. I don't mind sending private messages on facebook, but I don't like advertising my personal business to hundreds of "friends", some of whom I've only met once or twice in real life. It doesn't mean I don't like you all, it's just that I figure I can tell individual people what they need to know as the subjects come up naturally. I worry that a lot of people probably think I'm a jerk for just using facebook professionally as a musician. When I don't comment on your personal posts it doesn't mean that I don't care, it just means that I don't see the point in advertising to the world that I do care.
I do love going online and reading daily the positive things that some people have to say. Some people are just very pleasant. And I seem to know a lot of people with a lot of troubles who continue to put out a "glass half full" vibe. That makes me so happy. Then there are those people that I mentioned before, the ones that will find something to complain about every other hour, something to be over-the-top annoyed about, something to be judgmental about, something to just be negative about. And I wonder how easy their lives must be that they can get so upset about such small things.
So I wrote this song called "Suffer". It's about all the negativity that we surround ourselves with. Sometimes I think it's just so that we can have something to say, when sometimes it's really okay to have nothing at all to say. The first lines of the chorus to this song are, "The rain's gonna fall whether you like it or not, and I think maybe you suffer a little more than you ought to." Bad things are going to happen, and lots of little bad things are going to happen every day, but it's okay to keep a positive attitude. Isn't that what we should be putting out into the universe? Negativity only creates more negative response.
The other aspect to "Suffer" is the idea that sometimes it seems as if we like to get ourselves stuck in that negativity. It may be something as simple (and, in our own minds, as justified) as judging ourselves for our past mistakes. I don't necessarily write what most would call Christian music, but my Christian faith plays a large role in my songwriting. The idea that you can move on, be forgiven, and forgive yourself for things in the past is central to that. Whether you share the same faith or not, I hope that's a sentiment that we can all agree on. It's okay to put the past in the past when we try to move on and be better.
And there's always hope for a better day, just like the line in the song that says, "I can promise you there's still hope for a place to fly and room to grow." I know that I write a lot of sad and negative music, so this one was one of my attempts at balancing the scale. I hope that a song called "Suffer" can bring some happiness to someone who listens to it.
As a concert-goer, it's always fun to see what songs an artist will play on any given night. I've seen a lot of acts right in the midst of their first tours, usually opening for a much bigger band, and in those cases you usually go knowing what to expect. When I got to see Matchbox 20 open for the Stones in '98 it was no surprise to see them play through basically all of Yourself Or Someone Like You. I haven't had a chance to see them since, but I'm guessing that nowadays their show is completely different from one night to the next. Most of the bands I go see have a fairly large catalog from which to choose. After going to many Counting Crows concerts over the years, I can safely say that I can never predict what their setlist will be like. And I can't imagine what it must be like for those prolific songwriters like Bob Dylan or Ryan Adams to narrow down their possible song choices into just a couple hours of music.
I've written less than 30 original songs in my short time so far as a songwriter, but, playing locally, there's also the understanding that we as performers will play lots of covers at our gigs. So I can add all of the covers in with those and I end up with a catalog of over 200 different songs that we've performed. Shows generally last anywhere from 1 to 4 hours, depending on the venue and whether or not you might be the opener or the closer. So I've come to understand that the art of the setlist is just as important as the art of playing the individual songs in that setlist. Putting together a show from so many choices can be a lot of fun, or it can be just another thing to stress you out. And I think almost every performer has their own way of going about it.
I know that a lot of our friends who like to play at local restaurants may skip the setlist altogether. Sometimes this is because they're planning to just go with the flow and/or take requests. When we first started playing at different eateries we would put out laminated lists of about 100 songs from which we would take requests. It's definitely a great way to make tips and it's always nice to be able to please the crowd in a very specific way, but there were a couple of problems with this for me. The first was that we would end up playing a few songs three or four times in a single night. I'm not a fan of doing that, and I always felt bad for those who had come to watch the performance and had to sit through repeats. The second problem was that sometimes there are songs that you just don't feel like playing. That's okay for some types of performances, but I feel like I have to put tons of emotion into my shows to make them entertaining, so if I'm not feeling a song it's just not going to sound good. So I learned after a few months that I probably wasn't going to be the "by-request" guy.
Another method that we've seen a lot of great local musicians use is printing out one long list of all (or a subset of) their songs and choose from those on-the-fly during the performance. What's great about that is that you come prepared but you still have lots of freedom to read the crowd and keep playing tunes that they'll respond to. (Again, tips are nice, but so is lots of applause.) I've found that this worked okay for me sometimes when I'd be playing completely solo and could think on my feet, but it wasn't always great when playing with my dad or anyone else because we always felt afterwards that there was too much discussion and down-time between songs. When you're playing solo and thinking ahead, you can put a pretty good spontaneous set together. But then there are nights when you have that indecision. I like having a setlist.
So every time we play I try and take the time to put together a show that I would want to go see. It can be a mis-fire because you never know what the ebb and flow of the crowd in any given venue will be. But I create every setlist with the (yes, completely misguided) philosophy that every person there has come to watch us perform from start to finish. Whether we're playing a stage, a restaurant, or a coffeeshop, I like to pretend that we're headliner material. That means we start strong and finish stronger. I like to put lots of highs and lows in there, and I try my best to keep people guessing. I figure that if we can get someone to like one song, they may hate the next one and stick around just to see what we'll do next. That's why we might go straight from Johnny Cash to Cee Lo Green to Third Eye Blind. And I like to do things that way. I want to play what I want to play.
One thing that's really important to me in our shows is that we do justice to every song in the setlist. Sometimes I'll compose the list with a theme in mind, whether it's upbeat, mellow, or just downright sad. I confess that the sets often follow my mood at the time of the show. That's not always a fun thing. I was having a weird night about a year ago and decided to play "You Can't Always Get What You Want" with our "Round Here"/"Use Somebody" mash-up. I remember that was one that I might have gotten a little too into, because I started shaking so badly that we had to take a short break before the next song. But, since I judge every show by how much I put into it, I would say that it was worth it to make the performance believable.
Doing justice to every song also means that sometimes you cut something when you get to it. This could be because you're not in the mood or because maybe you're not one hundred percent sure of just one little lyric. If I think something in the set can only end in disaster, then it's gone. Then there are times when get to a point in a show and I think of something that we absolutely have to play right then. If I ever get that feeling, that's what we do. (Sometimes we also have to do this if we don't plan enough songs to fill the time.) It's really cool when you get rolling in a show and songs just start coming to you out of nowhere. That usually means you're really feeling it, and for some reason it usually means the crowd is too. Those are great nights.
I just finished putting together a solo acoustic setlist for tomorrow night's short-notice show at the Purple Pig. It's got 34 songs, and there are a lot in there that I don't play very often. But hey, those are the ones I think I'm going to feel like playing!
So I'll close tonight's post with a video of one of my favorite songs by Counting Crows. The first time I ever heard this one was in concert at the minor league ballpark in Tulsa. Earlier in the night, Adam Duritz had mentioned (in albeit a fuzzy kind of way) that he hadn't had such a good day. The setlist that night seemed to perfectly reflect that, and the music did not suffer for it. It was like they just decided to pick appropriate songs. But when they came out and played this one (which wouldn't show up on a record until many months later) for an encore, it all just seemed perfect. It was one of the most intense performances of anything I've ever seen to this day. So here's the best live video I could find online of their amazing song, "Cowboys". Hope you enjoy it as much as I do!
